Jamaal May Poems

You will often be held,
unable to hold back,
and it will be necessary
to get used to the downward swing,
anticipate the strike and love it,
if for no other reason than to love
the upward swing and sturdy
rhythm that accompanies the two.
Be hickory or ash, straight-grained
and strong enough to survive overstrikes—
one miss could snap your neck.
May sandpaper be the rough
hand that rubs you smooth.
Be carved until the end of you is a wedge—
you already intuit the precision it takes
to fit well enough to not be dislodged.
Be a length of carbon-rich steel,
2,350 degrees Fahrenheit in the open flame
before you are positioned between
two dies, let the pressure have
all of you until you are formed.
Have the flash cut from you;
excess is excessive. Be cooled in water,
not air. Don't breathe. Drown
...

(through smoke)

My mother became an ornithologist
when the grackle tumbled through barbecue smoke
and fell at her feet. Soon she learned
...

Spout of a leaf,
listen out for the screams
of your relentless audience:
the applause of a waterfall
in the distance,
...

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood
...

In the beginning
there was the war.

The war said let there be war
and there was war.
...

Acting on an anonymous tip, a shift supervisor
at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers.
Mrs. Haver was taping shut the mouths
...

There isn't much to discuss with the Machine
God, though its voice is hard to ignore;
it speaks in planks of wood shaped for the sea,
sputters of smoke, eats grass. It speaks in snow
spit into piles, commands the motion of a needle
through a hem. It hums. It waits.

Once, in a parking lot, it spoke to a boy waiting
for an exchange between a sewing machine
and his mother to come to an end. Mother's needle-
skilled fingers had already learned to ignore
pain, but the boy's hands were supple. The snow
under Father's idling car became a sea,

running into drains towards another sea
the boy hoped and hopes is out there waiting.
Almost heard it one morning, shoveling snow
as a neighbor's open garage rattled with machinery,
boatbuilding tools, a thrum he knew to ignore.
Damn fool, Father said, might as well build it with needles,

but the spell held the boy. To watch the needling
of a board through a notch was to see a wooden sea-
dragon and dream of riding it away. Boy, don't ignore
me. A lip split open. Shovel. Father hated waiting
and had even less patience for the broken machine
coughing exhaust in the yard, clutching a snow-

colored stone in its throat. Yes, he prayed the snow-
blower would take Father's hand. Yes, the needle
of Mother's scream, as the thumb was machined
clean off, brought icicles down. The boy listened for the sea.
Gripped his shovel. Gripped his oar. Now, in a waiting
room, he bows to the florescent hum and begs. Ignore

my prayer, goes his stupid little prayer, please ignore
my voice. The thumb in a jar packed with snow,
will take a miracle for doctors to reattach. Waiting,
as if to plead, Let me try my hand, give me the needle,
Mother taps a knitting needle against the sea-
foam-colored formica, rapid as a machine,

but the Machine God, still busy with the lights, ignores
the needle's morse code prayer, while the boy waits
for snowmelt in his mouth to taste of oak and sea.
...

have this, and this isn't a mouth
full of the names of odd flowers

I've grown in secret.
I know none of these by name
...

Tell me I once came close, that your body wasn't
an obelisk, and mine, so much wire wound
around wire. I will always wonder

if I can take you, know you will always be stronger,
and marvel at how you appear even larger
than before with my niece cupped

in your tattooed arms. I know something simple
provokes you to call: a comic book
we've both read, a good time

to visit, but my thumb hovers over decline
and I hold my breath before I press
against the waiting answer.

••

Before I left for Florida—a week after I tore
the collar of my shirt, twisting out
of your grip, a week after

I disappeared with our shared car, the Venture
minivan we nicknamed Vendetta,
and brought it back to you

empty and smashed—you stopped me to tell me
to never come back. You meant it. I said
I wouldn't. I meant flinching

is something I'd only do in oncoming light, never
the overcoat of a shadow; being the size of
a threat did strange things to my tongue.

••

Tell me about the night I hurled a phone receiver
at your head and the orb of blood on your lip
that seemed like it'd never fall, how you

bound me by a wrist, bruised my ribs against the floor,
and never threw a single punch. Wasn't that
a kind of gentleness, Jabari?
...

The air in this world is thicker than I remember
from nights at camp, whacking fireflies with a fallen branch.
I wondered if the shadows, numbering in the hundreds, were all cast
by the same god I hung out with when I was little—his voice
is the silence I've been afraid to hear since.
I would smack the side of a tree and stand in the rust-red
shower of leaves until I felt stronger than god;
I could've cracked his moon in half
if I wanted to—if I swung my stick high and hard enough,
if I screamed loud enough. But I'm afraid
to know what happens when enough
is the sound of my staff splintering against heaven,
a shock up my arm—
more with every strike.
No gods, still, though
I broke away from the campfire and its songs
so I could kneel in the woods, let wild grass grow
to meet my damp knees. To kneel with a question and rise
with a question is only one way to forget
your old prayers. Another is to busy your hands with sticks
carving your runes into a clearing's mud. I learned dead trees
could be pushed over by my small hands
if the rot was enough and I had leverage.
They creaked, cracked, and tumbled
down towards—
I don't know where;
my eyes couldn't follow that far in the dark.
I pretended there was another camp at the bottom
where they worshiped a god of wood and sap, and nightly,
when I snuck from my tent, I responded to their prayers with a sign,
this very wood crashing down around them.
...